Absolutely Serious

Blanchot and Bataille. Exemplary friends for W. Theirs was a friendship to which every friend should aspire. They met in 1940, after the fall of France. In 1940, in a France occupied by the enemy. The date I start (September 5, 1939), is no coincidence, Bataille writes as the opening line of what became Guilty.

They met in 1940. In a bar, wasn't it?, W. says. W. needs to believe they met in a bar. He needs to believe Blanchot approached Bataille amidst the cigarette smoke, tapped him on the shoulder, and said: 'You are the greatest author in France …' Is that how it happened? Blanchot, who was moving from the extreme right to the left. Blanchot in freefall. Blanchot looking to be saved by Bataille, who, in turn, needed saving (Klossowski: 'Blanchot saved Bataille with so much strength …')

Blanchot's Thomas the Obscure was soon to appear. His How is Literature Possible? And Bataille was soon to write Madame Edwarda, and 'The Torment', the great central section of Inner Experience.

They met nearly every day, these friends. They met in the two discussion groups organised in the flat of Bataille's lover (who was soon to become Blanchot's lover). Denise Rollin, that was her name. 'She was beautiful, a beauty that would be described as melancholy, if not taciturn. She spoke little or, for long periods, not at all': Bataille's biographer wrote that. Beautiful and silent, beautiful and nearly silent: don't we catch a glimpse of Rollin in the figure of N. in Blanchot's Death Sentence?, I speculate, but W. doesn't want to gossip.

Bataille was said to speak in a manner always absolutely serious: that's always impressed W. Blanchot himself says it, in one of his memorial essays. Absolutely serious, as if the most important issues were at stake. That's how W. dreams of speaking. That's how he does speak, with his more gifted friends.

'Georges Bataille had the power to speak no less than the power to write. I allude not to the gift of eloquence, nor to the notion that he was prepared to play a Socratic role …', so Blanchot. 'When he spoke about the most everyday things, the impression he gave, without being aware of it, was that he was about to impart something of the utmost importance', so Bataille's biographer.

The most serious of men. But not grave, not heavy. Light – Bataille was lightness itself, Blanchot remembers. Bataille was life itself … Oh to be capable of such friendship!, W. says. Not to let others down. Not to disappoint them. To look upwards, with one's friend. To look upwards into the sky of thought …